George Orwell thought the precise and
purposeful deployment of our language was the key to the
kind of politics we hoped to advance. By that standard, virtually
everyone—from the center to the left, from Barack Obama to Richard
Trumka to the activists of Occupy Wall Street—has made a hash of
the way we name the most crucial features of our society.

Exhibit A is the suffocating pervasiveness with which we use the
phrase “middle class” as the label we have come to attach to not
just all of those who are hurting in the current economic slump,
but to the entire stratum that used to be identified as working
class. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka proclaims “it was the labor
movement that built the middle class; it was the middle class that
made America great,” while out in Indiana, when the
Republican-dominated state legislature stood on the verge of
enacting a new set of anti-labor laws, a local unionist declared,
“Fighting right-to-work legislation is about standing up for our
middle-class values.”

The Obama administration has raised this conflation of working
class and middle class to a fine art. Vice President Joe Biden,
whose blue-collar roots in the gritty Pennsylvania coal country are
quite genuine, presided over a “Middle Class Task Force” during his
first couple of years in office; more recently, President Obama—in
an effort to identify his policies with the Progressive-era social
reformism of Teddy Roosevelt—used the phrase “middle class”
twenty-eight times in his highly-touted Osawatomie, Kansas speech
of early December 2011.

So what’s the problem? Who cares what we call something if we
know what it means?

But there is much difficulty with this rhetorical switcheroo.
First, the phrase “middle class” is virtually indefinable in any
fashion other than as a crude income calculus. To be middle class
is to be comfortable with a certain basket of goods and a heart
full of desires. As Biden’s Middle Class Task Force put it:
“middle-class families are defined more by their aspirations than
their income.” This is very much at variance with how we used to
define the middle class. Historians and sociologists once
distinguished between the old middle class and the new. The old
middle class was comprised of self-employed proprietors and
independent professionals who, in the nineteenth century, carried
real social and moral weight in a society where farmers and
craftsmen were also numerous. Then in the twentieth century, a new
middle class of salaried white-collar workers seemed to constitute
another relatively well-defined class and cultural cohort. But
today, the middle class is defined entirely in terms of income.
That may be useful for those seeking to push forward a liberal tax
policy. But it’s pretty useless when it comes to virtually anything
else. Thus in the summer of 2011, during a strike of forty-five
thousand Verizon workers, union publicists declared the struggle as
a “fight to defend middle-class jobs.” But this characterization
enabled Verizon to run newspaper ads claiming that the $75,000 a
year or more earned by telephone technicians made them part of the
“upper middle class” and thus, apparently, not worthy of much
public sympathy.

Indeed, the 60 percent of households in the center of the
American income distribution make anywhere from $28,636 to $79,040
per year. That’s family income by the way, which means that these
people are clearly struggling. By any standard, they compose an
American working class—although most definitions in common usage
today, certainly those put forward by most liberal Democrats,
extend the definition of the middle class up to about $200,000 a
year. At that point, we are talking about salaried professionals
and moderately successful entrepreneurs whose income puts them in
the top 10 percent of the American population. And if the 99
percent is taken as any sort of coherent grouping—and here even my
comrades at Labor Notes have taken to calling for
“Solidarity for the 99%”—then we are linking together the fortunes
of those on food stamps with families whose income tops out at just
over $500...

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